It's harder now because now you live in America and are used to seeing all these people as Americans, and then as members of whatever racial consciousness we have in America.

Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.

I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.

In my experience, south asians and middle easterners can easily tell I’m Bengali/Bangladeshi rather than (non-Bengali) Indian or Pakistani. Growing up in America I always assumed I looked Indian, but that’s because my reference point was european americans so I didn’t have sufficient data points in my mental model to work out aggregate tendencies.

There are plenty of Indians who in a literal sense could be classified as white (as in extremely fair pale skin), not just from Kashmir but even from South India. But if you’re Indian you can instantly pick them out as Indian, their entire facial structure etc is different from Europeans. In a sense, it is true, categories like “white”, “black” are social constructs that are meaningless at a genetic standpoint. But categories like, European, Nordic, Indian etc are not, if you put in some effort you can very easily distinguish between because of thousands of years of separate genetic evolution.

Yup! And many Americans would guess some north Indians are white because of convergent selection and shared ancestry. It's just that most prominent Indians tend to be south indian or Bengali in America. For example, most of the big name Indian ceos

I am just travelling around northern Italy (typing this from a Milano-Torino train), and there is a visible difference between people in the Po valley and people from Como, merely 50 km apart.

People from the Po valley, such as the Milanese, are mostly "lighter Mediterranean" types. People around Como Lake are visibly more blond and pale. The ethnic substrate is different, the ancient populations in southern Alps were more Celtic and Germanic, and even though the contemporary folk no longer speaks anything but Italian, the difference to much more mixed places such as Milano is still visible.

Same in northern Spain. Galicia and Asturias have a lot of pale, blue-eyed people who would stand out in an Andalusian crowd. Galicia has Celtic ancestry (they even preserved bagpipes as a folk instrument), and Asturias was the last refuge of the Visigoths when they were crushed by the Arabs in the 8th century.

You can also easily distinguish some other European subpopulations. For example, I met a lot of Lithuanians built as a, uh, brick shithouse. Neighbouring Poles tend to be somewhat less bulky. Many Russians have a visible Tatar admixture, with broad and flat faces. Ukrainians much less so.

And you can usually tell a Greek before they open their mouths. Some of them, especially in their older age, still resemble the old beardy statues from way-before-1-AD.

I could definitely tell population-level differences between phenotypes in places like UK vs Poland when I visited (and yes I know Polish immigration to the UK is popular), and I can tell differences between the average population-level look in German-dominated descendant areas in the US vs Italian and Jewish and Irish areas like NYC. I think maybe people are expecting it to be easy to do individual-level predictions which is a lot more of a coin toss, but just telling the broad differences isn't super hard.

Yes, it's not that hard to distinguish if it's something you're alert to and have enough input to start recognising the patterns.

You’re right, but you’re being really rude about it.

It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.

> It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.

Is it really rare? That seems to be the norm except for America and Africa that got replaced or displaced by colonization. But in Europe and Asia most areas has been populated by steady groups. Rulers come and go, but the people living there stays the same.

I think its rare for everyone to have been there for a thousand years, but its not rare for a majority of the genes to have stayed in one place for a thosand years.

Genetics strongly suggest Australia was settled by a single broad wave of humans that spread across the continent, finfing their niche, and staying in place whether that be east, west, north south, across desert, coast, rivers, forrest, etc.

This contrasts to earlier "literary" arguments in magazines such as Quadrant that native Australians moved about and fought for territories with invaders supplanting original dwellers long before Europeans arrived.

- https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...

is a national press article on some of that, my original references to the hosted papers on this seems to be offline / unavailable ATM (damn bitrot).

Thousands as in 2,000+ years? From my understanding that’s rare, at least by geography. I could be wrong.

But it’s not like we’re being super precise here. It’s fuzzy enough that lots of takes are correct, depending how you frame it. That’s kind of my point in my other reply. They weren’t wrong but they were being rude about it.

Prior to industrial revolution, mass immigration was difficult, not only because of logistics but tribalism.

Hungarians mass migrated about a thousand years ago from the Ural Mountains, several thousands of kms from present Hungary. Germans mass migrated to Hungary hundreds of years ago, especially after Mongols and Turks killed most of the population there. Italians lost their appetite to coriander because the mass migration of Germanic people around and after the fall of Rome.

It was more difficult, but it happened many-many times.

And they left very little trace in the genes of modern Hungarians. They did leave their language, of course.

The Turks ruined a large part of Europe but their genetic footprint in Turkey is only about 8%.

Where are you getting these numbers from ?

Without digging up old cemetaries (if they’d still exist) and sequencing DNA, there’s a lot of assumotions and conjecture

Yea, and like you just proved, it was very difficult. Hence the choice to do it in large groups.

If I sort out 20 Spaniards from different provinces and regions, you wouldn't guess if they were Spaniards, French, South Germans, North/South Italians or even Irish.

Yeah, and some also look Moorish, middle eastern, Sephardic, etc. too. Not a big surprise when you learn about the migrations that happened in Spain during the past 2000 years or so. We are a mixed bunch.

Yeah, South Italians/moorish, close enough.

Tell it the Vandals, the Goths, the Huns, the Angles (I.e English), the Normans, the Danes, the Mongols, the Turks, etc.

Not really no. Any student of linguistics is quickly dispelled of this notion

Yeah, I do not know why this is downvoted. This is exactly true about Europe.

It isn’t hard at all if you live in east or west Africa. Or if you live in Italy, or if you live in China, you can see local variations that are generalized in other places. It’s always been like, only recently have we made distinctions between Asians in say Iran and Japan (both are technically oriental by medieval European standards) .